CHC 1979-05-15 PH - Laserfiche WebLink

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• • • about this- tax. business because of the property tax and so on fend have come up with things like .this. • They 'have also come up with ' the idea of--even among; the departments. in the county some of them are saying that okay why can ' t we -merge some of the departments together rather than making-them into separate divisions? They feel that probably it could be better operated under this type of a merger. • • They are talking about the possibility of having a legal counsel,. for the county council .because .they . don ' t have one. - • All of these things have come before us. So now we have some ways and means of trying to look at the charter and saying •okay the charter says this. Now the people of the County of Hawaii are voicing their opinion and saying hey we • need some changes made. If the changes are for the good of the county and for the people then we have to look at these things from that standpoint and try to deliberate. 'When we do delibe- rate on all of these points where the people have voiced their concerns now we know where we stand also. Now we cannot just say okaywe art_tong'to_=do this because we don ' t know what the people'are really looking at In the charter. I think the most difficult part of the whole situation is the fact that many . people do not understand the charter. They don ' t know too much. about it because they haven ' t studied It and they haven ' t really looked ' into it from the standpoint of what are the revisions . ' to be made or amendments to be made. We have had groups come before us who have studied this backwards and forwards.. They can give us figures percentwise, populationwise and all of these things' from their standpoint because they have studied and said okay these are our concerns , this is the way we want to have this done. What we are trying to get from you people is what do YOU people think about representation? How do you want the county to be represented? If we go on the five representa- tive. 'district 'type situation,; Waimea is out, right? How do • • you people feel about these things? Are we talking about nine • councilmen? Seven councilmen? Are' we talking about five representative districts? We have to really look at this from all of these standpoints so that we know where we stand. Also we have gone to different areas and some of them say I haven ' t even seen the charter at all . You know, what is the County Charter? What does it look like? So we • did get from the county, the County Charter. You may sign up for them and use .them on' loan this evening and return them to us after the meeting. What we really want from the public now is what do you want? What type of representation? What-kind of tax base are you people' interested in on property tax and so on? • - Residential tax? ' • • • • -4 •